Colored Pencil Art

Colored pencil art is rapidly experiencing a whole new level of appreciation in the art world. I'm here to show you how fresh and innovative color pencil art can be!

Just take a look at some of my colored pencil drawings along the right side of this page to get an idea of the amazing versatility of this fun art medium!

Colored Pencil as Professional Art Medium

While colored pencils were once considered to be primarily for kids, throughout the years they have been steadily gaining respect amongst artists, galleries, and collectors. Artists are exploring the creative potential of this art-making medium, while art collectors and enthusiasts are marvelling at their output!

Chances are, you probably used colored pencils when you were a kid, so you already have some degree of familiarity with them. But there is a big difference between artist grade colored pencils and the colored pencils usually used by children. Professional artist-quality colored pencils contain a higher degree of wax and pigment than the colored pencils used by children. These pencils allow for a really rich, deep and luminescent color. Finished drawings can be so smooth and pigmented that they resemble paintings!

Colored Pencils for Fine Artists

Artist-quality colored pencils are light-resistant or lightfast. They can be sharpened to a fine point to allow for exquisite detail. My favorite brand of colored pencils, which I used to create the drawings you see on this page, are Prismacolor Colored Pencils (this links to Blick Art Materials, and if you make a purchase I get a small commission that helps support this site). Prismacolors come in a range of 132 colors... more than enough to draw just about anything! But this is where it gets even better - the colors can be easily blended together in endless combinations to create even more shades, tints and hues. You can basically draw anything with colored pencils that you would be able to depict with paint. Colored pencil art can easily rival paintings in luminosity and depth of color!

As you can see from my colored pencil art that lines the left and right columns of this page, colored pencils can be used to create artwork in a variety of styles, such as photorealism, abstraction, whimsical, and composite (combination of styles).

Advantages of Working with Colored Pencils

Colored pencils have many advantages. For one thing, they are extremely lightweight and portable. They don't require any intensive set-up - you can just take them wherever you go, open your sketchbook or drawing pad, et voila! An artmaking session with colored pencils is just as quick and easy to clean up as it is to set up. This makes colored pencils very non-messy compared to other art mediums.

Colored Pencils Lessons and Examples

Bird Drawings

These colored pencil bird drawings depict a variety of birds in colorful scenarios, with the aim to expand our usual view of the creatures we meet in nature.